Sisko is overall my favorite captain, because he wasn’t idealized as a “Star Trek Captain” but rather as a nuanced man forced by circumstance to compromise his principles for the greater good. That’s a useful story to tell, a lesson as it were that in war, if the truth is the first casualty, the second casualty is circumstantial morality.
But to some extent DS9’s success at telling a story compromised the entire franchise. Voyager and Enterprise both tried to build on that premise, but whether it was the writing or the acting, or just a general loss of direction, I felt like Roddenberry’s guiding principles for what Star Trek was supposed to be were thrown out the window. Now tough ethical problems weren’t dealt with Solomon-style. There was no philosophy, and the underpinnings of Trek collapsed.
I actually enjoyed Discovery. I’m not sure I liked the style of filming, it’s a little too modern for my tastes, but generally the stories were pretty good, and certainly the second season with Christopher Pike in charge began to feel like the old Trek; an idealistic captain, not afraid to get his hands dirty, but ultimately a good guy who bent rules, but understood why there were rules.
I have some hope for Picard. Patrick Stewart has been heavily involved in the development of the series, and since he largely constructed Jean Luc Picard, I can’t imagine him compromising the character he is most closely identified with. The hints of the timeline, that this is after the destruction of Romulus (and the suggestion that the mass rescue operation he mounted may have failed), I think there’s a way to delve into his character and get new insights. Picard was sort of the anti-Kirk, where Kirk was portrayed as the too-clever-by-half dashing ship’s captain (a bit of a Horatio Hornblower), Picard was the renaissance man; a diplomat, an amateur archaeologist, formidably well read, charismatic in a cool confident way, but in many respects a private man and an introvert who didn’t mind his own company.
